1. Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to a fitness device-based simulator and a simulation method using the simulator and, more particularly, to a fitness device-based simulator and a simulation method using the simulator, which accumulate exercise pattern information about the motion of a user who exercises on a fitness device, predict the subsequent exercise state of the user from the accumulated exercise pattern information, and then control the operation of the fitness device, thus allowing the user to more stably and realistically experience virtual reality.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, with the development of various User Interface (UI) or User Experience (UX) technologies, various virtual reality systems for recognizing the motion of a user and operating a corresponding system have been introduced. For this, various techniques for recognizing the user's motion by extracting the skeletal structure information of the user have been developed, and various interactive systems that exploit them have been developed. In particular, in order to allow the user to perform various motions so as to provide a more realistic virtual reality system to the user, various types of virtual reality simulators based on a fitness device, such as a treadmill, have been used. However, conventional virtual reality simulators using a treadmill are disadvantageous in that only a system for driving the treadmill by simply analyzing the current exercise speed of a user is provided, and thus the operation of the treadmill by the user is not stable. The conventional virtual reality simulator, which considers only the exercise speed of the user in this way, deteriorates the user's convenience and prevents the user from being immersed in the virtual reality, thus making it impossible to provide the user with a virtual reality experience that is more realistic.
Meanwhile, Korean Patent Application Publication No, 2014-0144868 (Date of publication: Dec. 22, 2014) entitled “Treadmill and control method of the same” discloses a treadmill for automatically controlling the movement speed of a belt by sensing the position of a user, and a method for controlling the treadmill. However, the conventional treadmill control technology, such as Korean Patent Application Publication No. 2014-0144868, uses only the information obtained by simply sensing the position of the user or the exercise speed of the user in real time, and thus there is a limitation on the effective recognition of the user's continuous motions and the speed thereof. Further, the user's motion is a sequence of continuous actions over time, but the conventional treadmill control technology does not take into consideration the continuity of such user motion.